Valve Kills Steam Greenlight In Favor Of New Service: Steam Direct

Players will have to start saying goodbye to Steam Greenlight, Valve’s method of allowing games to be put on Steam. The company announced today that the service would be shutting down to make room for the service that will take its place, called Steam Direct. Steam Direct will fill the same role.

Greenlight, back in its day, allowed would-be developers to put their games onto the service in order to have players try them out or read their concepts and give votes to see if the game would be put onto the main Steam store. However, there were a few scummy concepts that people liked to use in order to abuse the system, such as fishing for upvotes to get their games onto Steam. Valve has apparently taken steps to keep this from happening with Steam Direct, though.

While Steam Greenlight relied on votes from the userbase, indie developers that want to put their games on Steam will have to send in their games to Steam, paying a fee (which you’ll pay after giving Valve a set of digital paperwork you fill out, along with personal or company vindication, and tax documents) for every title they want to put. Once Valve gets your games and makes sure they actually work, you’ll be put on Steam.

While this fast-tracks the games submitted through Direct, it’s possible that it may bring in a large amount of new games that haven’t been checked for quality, though hopefully the fee of putting the game onto Steam in the first place will keep people that develop awful games from even being able to put it through in the first place.

Valve still has to settle on a fee for people to make use of the Steam Greenlight replacement and we have no idea when Steam Direct will actually arrive, but hopefully the games that go through it will actually be good.